Chapter 1- Just Another Day at Work

The LED headlamp strapped to my forehead illuminated my pistol and several feet of the tunnel ahead. I hadn’t planned to be crawling down a tunnel, only slightly larger than I am, beneath the city of Arkham, Massachusetts, at half-past midnight, but such is the life of a … Hmm, as I thought about it, I wasn’t sure what my title was. Agent? Investigator? Paranormal should be in there somewhere. All I knew was that I came back from a social event last week, and an envelope lay on my dresser. It had my name on it and inside was a place, a time, and a contact name. When I asked my housekeeper, Sarah, about the envelope, she said she had not placed it there. Apparently, I had been accepted into the club, the one my mother, Lady Elizabeth Southwell, had been a part of after she left MI6. The one to which she only alluded, the one that involved things from outside this plane of existence.

The smell hit me before I saw the opening. Dark, moldy, rotten fish … I almost puked but swallowed it back down. Turning off my flashlight, I clicked the switch on my fancy-schmancy night-vision goggles and quickened my crawl. The stone tunnel flared as it opened, decreasing my claustrophobia. I didn’t actually have claustrophobia, but I could think of other places I’d rather be than in a small tunnel with thousands of tons of rock over me.

There was no cool way of removing myself from the tunnel. I craned my neck to look above the end of the tunnel, picturing a root above the hole that I could grab onto and stick an Olympic dismount, but no such luck. I found only a large tunnel extending both directions into darkness, beyond the capability of my goggles to penetrate. It seemed clear, so I slid to the floor like a … a rich Pensacola socialite, I refrained from the obvious, instead deciding I was like a giant black sausage squished from its casing. I thought the three-foot drop might hurt, but fortunately, there were several inches of rotting muck to cushion my fall.

The outfit I wore is what my friend and sometimes sidekick, Stefan, called my ninja suit. It was a form-fitting jumpsuit of matte-black neoprene. A hood zipped onto the collar of the suit and clung tightly to my head, leaving only my face exposed, and my night-vision binoculars currently covered part of that. I stood as quickly as I could, slinging the slime from my gloves and nearly throwing myself off-balance in the effort.  Though none of the smelly black slime could touch my skin through the suit, I felt nasty by association. I never thought of myself as prissy in any sense, but I was going to walk through a car wash when I got out of here, strip down, and walk through again.

A man’s scream echoed from my right. That would be Dr. Wayne Miller, an archeology professor at Miskatonic University. He had decided, based on a light perusing of some ancient arcane stone tablets, that he could summon and control things outside our natural world. He screamed again. I was guessing he now realized he had been wrong.

I pulled my .357 and moved quickly toward the sound. Other tunnels, large and small, intersected the one I was currently scurrying down, and I checked quickly as I passed, looking for the carrion-eating ghouls who lived in this type of environment. The baddies the professor had summoned had apparently run them off. The ghouls were a race of intelligent, patient and ferociously territorial beasts that I had dealt with before, but the things Dr. Doom had summoned were a different level of madness entirely and made me both excited and concerned.

Forty-five minutes later, drawn by the occasional scream or whimper, I spotted the end of the tunnel. I took the set of ascending spiral stone steps, up 40 feet until I stood at a large metal door, not fully closed.

I pushed the door and looked into a huge tall-walled courtyard. It was either an interior space of a sizable home or a small apartment building. Artificial light flooded into the area from various sources, making my night-visions useless. I lifted them off my eyes and settled them on my forehead, then waited for a few more seconds while my natural sight adjusted. Though I never knew my father, and my biological mother had been a drug addict before her death, I was thankful they had given me good genes.

I was moderately pretty, smart, with no major abnormalities, other than the overabundance of sarcasm. I credit my adoptive mother, Lady Liz, who had died about a year ago, err, kind of died, almost died … it was complicated. Anyway, she took the raw genetic material and shaped it into the young woman I am today. Liz gave me the knowledge and skills to be a real “pinky up” lady in the British sense who could also swim in the deep end of the southern elite social pool. Since British intelligence, MI6, had employed her, she also taught things that I found useful when dealing with the shadier parts of society. Another scream brought me back to the present. I left the safety of the stairwell and slipped into the courtyard.

As I was from Florida, I knew tropical plants when I saw them, and this 60-foot square space was full of them, as thick as any Central American jungle. The door opened into a shallow alcove stuffed with tanks and piping. A machine kicked on to my left, and I turned to see a large water pump and sand filter, which told me there was probably a koi pond or swimming pool somewhere near. A series of wall mounted irrigation controllers caught my eye, and I followed a two-inch pipe up the wall twenty feet until it branched left and right. Every few feet, a dark-colored one-inch pipe connected to the larger pipe at a right angle and headed off across the space above my head. Sprinkler heads protruded from the bottom of each pipe, which was supported every ten feet by poles that poked up above stands of tall bamboo used as camouflage. The combination of height and color made it so I could barely see it. I figured that being in here at night when the sprinklers were on was probably like being in a tropical summer downpour.

There was a light source that wavered in direction and intensity, like from a fire, but I could not see it without pushing my way through several feet of lush flora. When I did so, I had a wide-eyed, mouth-gaping moment. Someone had created a circle in the center of the space, and the diameter was accented by fire, while the interior was roiling clouds of blue-green neon. At the center of a circle and hovering eight-feet above the ground was a turbulent spherical-mass of dark viscous fluid. It spun slowly, much like a globe, and as it did, the fluid in it churned. Occasionally, some of the fluid stretched out in a long, tentacle-like arm, and from the tip, an eye formed. Each time an arm collapsed back into the mass, the eyes floated on the surface for an instant before disappearing.

A steel frame near the circle suspended Dr. Miller along with three other frames, a person suspended in each, their arms and legs tied to separate corners of the frame. The frames sat around the circle at the four compass points with the good doctor taking the westerly position. He appeared to be coherent, or at least coherent enough to scream. His mouth opened, but either nothing came out or I couldn’t hear it. The way the heads of the other captives sagged, another man and two women, I assumed they were either unconscious or dead.

I wasn’t sure what I could do. I only had one other experience with extra-planar beings several months ago, but even then, they had appeared to be land bound, like gigantic slugs, and we killed them with heavy explosives. At the time, I also had Liz’s boyfriend James, my police detective friend, and Stefan as support. This time, it was just me. I looked at my pistol with suspicion. Did I see betrayal in that short barrel, suspecting even its heavy bullets would not affect this being? I thought about releasing the people. These beings were often picky about how things were set-up and screwing with it might screw with the magic that was keeping the portal open. I wasn’t sure if the portal was the proper name, but I didn’t have an encyclopedia of the Elder God stuff, so sue me.

I started to leave the cover of the foliage when movement caught my eye. Heavy bodied human-like creatures with large heads and no necks shuffled back and forth just behind the frames. They appeared to be the things that had been reported by the dockworkers on the Miskatonic River over the past several months. My contact at the university called them Deep Ones. I counted at least ten monsters. I had more than enough ammunition, and since they were not known for their speed on land, I figured I had the advantage. My real problem was that I wasn’t sure what the hideous black phlegm ball was going to do. When I had interviewed my contact, Professor Xavier Bronson, he told me about the disappearance of Dr. Miller and clued me in about the Deep Ones, but he had mentioned nothing about eight-foot spinning balls of eyes and tentacles.

I stepped back and to the right, then noticed a little dais on the far side of the circle. A robed figure stood, arms raised. “Damn, a wizard,” I whispered. I clenched my fists and pretended to stomp. There was always a wizard or a priestess. I looked again and saw its mouth was moving just below the bottom edge of the cowl it wore. It wouldn’t take algebra to figure out it was chanting either a prayer or a spell. Suddenly, a black arm shot out from the spinning ball of goo and touched the woman positioned on the north side of the sphere. Her head jerked up, her mouth opened, and she burst into ash.

I shuddered, there being no fire to explain the physical transition, the woman went from flesh and blood to ash, which was now floating to the ground. A second arm reached out, and the man on the south point was gone. Two down, and I couldn’t wait for the third. I pointed my pistol at the wizard, but with the jungle in my way, I didn’t have a clear shot. Plus, once I pulled the trigger, I would be forced to deal with the fishy beasts.

Another thought jumped into my brain, and I holstered my gun, turned and pushed one of the buttons on the irrigation controller. When I heard the valve roll and water rush into the pipe, I pulled out my smaller 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson and stepped out into a clear space. Aiming at the sprinkler head closest to the fire, I pulled the trigger. The head shattered into a million pieces and water sprayed down into the courtyard, not in a light mist as it was designed to do, but gushing gallons a minute. The water hit the spinning monster, and it roared in a high-pitched scream that sounded half woman and half 747 jet engine. Apparently, it didn’t like being wet, so I shot three more sprinklers being careful not to hit the main pipe. I silently thanked Lady Liz for the hours she drilled me on the gun range until I was an expert, especially with my 9mm.

The thing’s arm whipped out, and the woman on the east side turned to dust. I heard the priest yell something, and the Deep Ones were on the move. They split into two groups, each shuffling around the circle in opposite directions. The odds that I was going to save Dr. Miller were lessening quickly. I ran to the left, moving my pistol to my right hand and pulling my .357 with my left. As the monsters cleared the edge of the circle and focused on me, my guns roared. The mouths of these beasts were huge and full of sharp pointed teeth, which gave me the perfect target. They opened those giant maws as they approached but closed them as a bullet exited the back of their heads. In a few seconds, all six of them fell to the dirt, five of them with my 9 and one from my .357, which meant I had five shots left.

I reached Dr. Miller, holstered my guns, and grabbed my clip knife. Flipping it open, I prepared to cut his bindings. I moved my hand toward where I assumed the rope would be, and I noticed two things. There was no rope. He had simply just hung there in space. The second thing was that he was not there, a light coat of dust drifted down to cover me as the tentacled arm pulled back to the monster. “Holy Hell,” I said.

The scuffing and shuffling I heard behind me reminded me that the other Deep One’s group had arrived. I turned to meet them, pulling and leveling my .357 out again. I have to say, I was a little pissed. “All this nastiness for nothing,” I said to them as they approached.  I was about to pull the trigger when I heard a man scream. The monsters looked surprised and stopped to look, as did I. The water from the broken pipe above still fell on the flames in the circle, and they were almost out, agitating the monster in the center. Its arms shot out violently in every direction, and the priest on the dais, or whatever he was, screamed in a language that sounded like Latin. Suddenly, the flames died, and the bright neon blue of the circle darkened to the ugly blue-green of a horrible bruise. It had been my experience that you could only flex the rules of magic so far. At some point, the rules had to be observed, like the circle of fire, its wholeness held the portal open or something just as significant to the ritual.

The fish-faced beasts appeared to understand the jig was up. Lightning danced across the surface of the portal, and the Deep Ones panicked, mumbling in a guttural string of croaks and moans that caused slime to drip from their mouths. They stumbled into each other in an attempt to be the first to leave. I took that as my cue and turned to run back to the door and stairwell. Funny enough, I ran past them in a wide arc and got to the door before them. I yanked on the door, but it didn’t budge. Turning, I saw the five large figures, backlit against the ambient light, shuffle toward me. I pulled my guns and mentally counted the remaining rounds in each. A math whiz I was not, but two .357 rounds and no 9mm rounds equaled two. Five Deep Ones minus two still left three problems.

Holstering my 9mm, I pulled my clip knife. I was no Rambo, but Lady Liz had trained me in knife fighting, and I would make sure I left them blind before they took me out. I lined my sights upon the closest fish-man and pulled the trigger. Though it was too dark to see the exact placement, I knew I had hit something important when the beast sagged and hit the ground like a burlap sack full of wet leaves. I was lining up for the next one when the garden brightened for an instant, and a shape loomed to my right. I reflexively held up my arm, just in time to block a face-mangling swipe of claws from a Deep One I had not seen. As it was, its claws tore gashes in my suit, and I felt the sting of sweat in at least two open wounds.

I spun backward and used the snap to lash the knife up and past the throat, or where the throat would have been if it had a neck. I felt resistance against the blade, though not as much as I would have thought. I was expecting something more akin to sharkskin, but what I got was more like the soft slick skin of a catfish. The beast screamed and gurgled, spraying blood onto my suit and face. It stumbled back and fell.

I raised my gun again, my finger tensed on the trigger when the air brightened again. The Deep Ones also noticed and turned to look, and I used that as my opportunity to be somewhere else. I stepped to the left and ran down the wall, hoping to find another exit.

At the first clear opening in the foliage, I looked back to the portal just as the man on the dais disappeared into the circle, now so bright I only had a quick glance before averting my eyes. Even still, I had that camera-flash-dots-thing blocking my vision. I heard loud barks, burps, that I realized were the screams of the Deep Ones. The dots in my eyes cleared enough for me to see that the portal had cooled and was now full of dark clouds that were spinning like the eye of a hurricane. A wind kicked up, and all the trees and bushes began shuttering and bending toward the portal.

Everything related to the ritual flew into the swirling darkness, including the steel frames that had once held the good doctor and the others, dead monsters, and the dais, positioned next to the portal, all gone in a second. Several large potted plants were pulled into the hole, too. Trees bent toward the scene, and for a second, as the wind strengthened, I thought I would need to grab hold of something, then it suddenly stopped. I walked over to the place where the black jelly monster had been. A burned ring of grass was the only thing left. I glanced over at the alcove when the pool pump kicked on with a hum, but no monsters. Nothing more unusual than an access door standing ajar. I left through a heavy wooden gate that opened into a nicely kept back alley, pushed the hood of my suit back, then removed the gloves. I moved quickly out of the area, just as the first siren approached.

I decided against the car wash. Instead, I went to the back door of the motel I had rigged for easy opening and stripped down in my room. As I soaked in hot water of the bath, I wasn’t sure what my report would say. I wasn’t even sure if I had to write a report, and if I did, where would I send it? Maybe I could leave it in a manila envelope on the desk in my bedroom. I smiled at the ridiculousness. Regardless of what I decided to do with the written report, I decided to call Stefan.

“Hello, Bliss’s Mortuary. You stab’em, we’ll slab ’em,” Stefan Petros answered. He was my best friend and frequent adventuring sidekick, or as he might say, “Tactical Support.”

It felt good to hear his voice, it forced a smile and made me feel warm inside. I slid down the back of the tub a couple of inches as if he might be able to see me. “I didn’t know you had a side business going, but I want a cut if you’re going to use my name.”

“Crap, you found out already,” he said. “Well, I would give you a cut, but business is bad so…” He paused for a breath. “You okay?”

I nodded at the phone as if he could see me. “Yeah, but I’m going to have trouble forgetting some of the stuff I saw.”

“Worse than the last?” he asked, referring to the case several months ago where we were forced to fight ghouls, Elder Gods, and maniacal occult people.

“Ehh, maybe not, but it was close. I lost the doctor. I could have used a backup.”

There was a pregnant pause before he spoke. “Sorry, Bliss. You know I wanted to but with my sister’s wedding and studying for finals. I mean, it’s my last year … one of us has to live a normal life, right?”

“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to guilt you.”

“Next one,” Stefan said. “Me and you on the next one. There will be a ‘next one’ won’t there?”

“Probably,” I said. “But regardless of who the ones are tasking me, I’m going to take a year to recuperate.”

“You got my vote. Now hurry back.”

“Will do,” I said and pressed the disconnect button on my phone. I slid even deeper until my chin was just below the surface of the warm sudsy water, and I started a mental list. First, finish the bath. Second, pack. Third, book a flight home – Pensacola, Florida.